19 March

Iron Gate, Cossayuna. Descent into madness

by Jon Katz
Iron Gate, Cossayuna

When I began my rather spectacular crack-up three or four years ago, one of the first things I did as I talked to myself, walked through the woods at night, and fell into what Joseph Campbell calls a dark and disconnected place, was call B&H Photo in New York. I told a man named Paul (I assume he was a member of the Orthodox Jewish sect that owns that amazing place) I wanted to take photos.

Have you taken many photos, he asked?

No, I said. I’m not sure I’ve ever taken any. And I’ve never owned a camera, not since college.

We talked for awhile, and I got my first Canon. And I drove with Izzy out to Kinney Road in the cold and started taking photos of sunsets, and then dead leaves on my path. These photos were not good and to this day I don’t know why I made that phone call, or what prompted it.

I do remember my daughter telling me it was a good idea. She is very encouraging in that way. (She said the same thing about the videos). I believe the first photos were love letters to Maria. As an artist, she supports art wherever she finds it. We didn’t know one another too well then. But she looked on my blog every night and she called me up and talked about the photos, and told me how promising they were. It was the only way in which we spoke for a long time. I think my photos are still love letters to Maria, and that’s why there is emotion in them.

Canon’s expensive L series lenses did hurt either.

Whatever the reasoning, something inside of me very much wanted to come out of me, and the light came on in my soul, in many ways, and I now  shudder to think of a life without photos. I do, in fact, see the world anew.

Every day my heart just rises and I often laugh out loud in joy when I spot a photo like the one above. I don’t know why, it just touches me. I hope the videos will be the same.

A few weeks after I started putting up my photos, I started getting advice and criticism from a famous photographer who was succumbing to a chronic illness. Every morning he came onto my blog, looked at my photos and sent me an often blistering e-mail.

But he said many things that stuck in my consciousness to this day, two years after his death. One of them was, “you can take a beautiful photo of anything, absolutely anything, anywhere you go, if you keep your eyes and mind open.” I think of you, David, and I bless you and thank you for caring about my work and guiding it. If you are watching me still, I ought to tell you that those were good and meaningful words.”

19 March

Country Road. Spring. A writer’s purpose

by Jon Katz
The writers life. Country Road

Country Road

In the new information, cultural and technological universe, what,

I sometimes wonder, is the writer’s purpose? It has changed, and yet it hasn’t.

I can only speak for myself, but this is as far as I have gotten.

To think beyond the printed word, and into the realm of images, to follow the words and ideas

of the ether as well as the page.

To change with ideas, and grow with them, rather than to cling to them blindly.

To provoke.

To make people happy.

To make people uncomfortable.

To inspire.

To challenge lies.

To uplift.

To seek out common experience and capture it.

To make sense of the light and images of the world.

To fight for love and compassion.

To seek a moral place.

To see past cheap and easy labels.

To see beyond the power of money and false notions of security

into the human spirit.

To be fulfilled. And to support and encourage

others who seek to be fulfilled.

To be open. To die when the body goes,

not when the frightened

mind retreats into the old days and the old ways.

19 March

Doors and windows

by Jon Katz
Doors and windows. Spring

I love this Spring photograph because it not only suggests Spring, but there are so many different things happening in a small space – door, window, vines, slates, brick, old door. It speaks I think, to the life of the family farm, a dying thing in America, part of the war on rural life that leaves rural areas with few jobs, no broadband, and an economic system that drives people here to mostly bad jobs in cities, box stores that destroy small businesses, and supermarkets that import food from thousands of miles that could be grown right here.

These old barns speak to that, at least to me.

19 March

Stories of our lives

by Jon Katz
Stories of our lives

One of my favorite buildings. The Glens Falls Machine Works

Today is the fourth and last day of my story-telling workshop in Clifton Park, at the library there. The class has a rich mix of people, stories and experience – cancer, anger, grief, confusion. I’d like to continue it in some form, perhaps in Glens Falls, or somewhere in the Adirondacks.

I’m putting the finishing touches of my first real video, I think, a study of Lenore and the dogs in connection with “Meet The Dogs Of Bedlam Farm.” A step forward for me. I’ll put it up on Monday.

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